“My God,” stammered Jimmy, almost swallowing his cigarette and clutching the other by the arm, “you can’t do a thing like that.”
The look of hopeless distress on the press agent’s face caused the hotel man to laugh uproariously, for a moment, but he checked himself suddenly.
“What’s the idea?” he inquired. “Why can’t we? You act as if we were going to charge the bill to you.”
“Maybe you are, old man,” was Jimmy’s response as he led Wilkins over to the latter’s little office. “I want to slip you a little side-line of conversation that you’ve got to promise to keep Masonic.”
So it came to pass that in the quiet sanctity of the little office Jimmy outlined certain unpublished details concerning the activities and real mission of Prince Rajput Singh though he said nothing about that dusky gentleman’s previous condition of servitude. He represented him as being a genuine Indian nobleman, temporarily down on his luck, who had consented to assist in a carefully contrived and ingenious scheme of indirect advertising.
“Have a heart, old man,” he pleaded when he had finished. “If you scale that two hundred down to about—well, say twenty-five and Bartlett’ll have heart failure even at that figure—I’ll arrange to have his royal niblets have dinner every night in your Egyptian dining room. You know yourself you don’t do much trade in there. We’ll have those two Hindu birds cook a lot of these curry dishes right there in full view of the audience and wait on him. You’ll be able to hang the little old S.R.O. sign out in a couple of days, take it from me.”
The assistant manager succumbed to Jimmy’s siren song and consented to slash the rate for the royal suite in return for the special performance by the prince and his entourage which the press agent promised to stage nightly.
Mr. J. Herbert Denby and Prince Rajput Singh made their joint debut on the lecture platform on the following afternoon before a select and soulful audience largely composed of middle-aged females who hung rapturously on every word uttered by both speakers.
Mr. Denby was in fine form. His discourse on “The Rig-Veda” was as vague and misty as a treatise on the Hegelian philosophy and about as full of real mental nourishment for that particular audience as a scientific monograph on the bony structure of the dactylopterus volitans would have been. He soared into the outer void and returned with bay-leaves on his brow and with esoteric phrases dripping from his tongue. The more hopelessly involved he became in the mystic mazes of his metaphysical theme, the more ardent seemed to be the rapt devotion with which his listeners received his remarks. When he finished in one grand, exultant outburst of poetic fervor a hushed silence fell upon the gathering and when a ripple of applause broke in upon it there were those whose brows darkened as if something holy had been profaned.
It remained, however, for the pseudo Prince Rajput Singh to achieve the real sensation of the afternoon. Arrayed in a purple robe and turban of exquisite silk and carrying himself with a careless air of superb distinction that was fascinating to watch, he delivered a brief talk in which he pleaded for a better understanding between the East and the West and urged a study of Indian ways and customs as the best method of bringing such an entente cordiale about, such a study as was rendered possible, for instance, by witnessing a performance of a play he had recently seen in New York—was it called “The Ganges Princess?”—he was not sure.